


On the Outside

by lady_wordsmith



Series: Memories (Bucky/Reader) [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Difficult Decisions, Everyone Has Issues, Everyone Needs A Hug, Except Sam, F/M, Past Relationship(s), Protective Steve Rogers, Reader-Insert, Romance, Sam just gets shit done, Talk of being on the run, and thinks the fact he has to explain everything to these idiots is ridiculous, at this point he doesn't even realize he's doing it, is it a chekov armory yet, oh look more chekov's guns, which may be important later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 16:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6291226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_wordsmith/pseuds/lady_wordsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve struggles with the idea of helping Bucky find you. He promised his friend he'd see this through, but at the same time there's so much at doubt and so much potential for pain that he's uncertain.<br/>Sam continues to think they're both idiots. But he's too polite to say it.<br/>(Takes place a little bit before, during, and after <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6228325">Another Decision to Make.</a>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Outside

“Are we doing the right thing here? You and I both know there’s three ways this whole thing ends up, Sam, and none of them fall under the heading of good.”

“We told him we’d help.”

“Yeah, but…”

“You’re afraid for him.”

Steve sighed.

“Are we really doing the right thing here, Sam?” he asked. “It’s been years.”

Sam looked up from his computer. So far, he was still chasing the leads. His former counselee, one Deron Andrews, hadn’t been easy to locate, but he managed. Now he was going through Deron’s associates trying to find the missing link that connected him to Bucky’s mystery girl.

“Well, like you said, there’s three ways her story goes. Either she’s dead, alive, or still missing. Which one scares you the most?” Sam asked. He knew what Steve was really saying. He was worried about Bucky, what Bucky would do in the face of any of those outcomes.

Steve sighed again, scrubbing a hand across his face.

“Right now, I don’t know. All of them have downsides.” He admitted. “If she’s still missing, it’s another problem we have to solve in addition to the registration act. If she’s alive, she might not want to get anywhere near Bucky for any number of reasons. And if she’s… If…”

“If she’s dead, HYDRA’s responsible. And if HYDRA’s responsible…” Sam let it hang in the air.

“It would kill him.” Steve whispered. “I saw the way he talked about her.” Steve bit his lip. “He loves her. Never thought I’d see Bucky in love, to be honest.”

“Crazy situation. High risk. High emotions. Be surprised if he hadn’t.” Sam said. He’d seen it more than once, the stories among the vets he counseled. Falling for a compatriot in a high stress situation. “I’m amazed he’s stayed that way.”

Steve looked at Sam with a confused look. Sam sighed.

“Look, I’ve seen these things. They flare up, flame out when the stress is over and they have nothing in common. Your boy here may be chasing more of an ideal than a person right now.”

Steve looked away for a long time, thoughtful.

“Maybe.” He admitted. “He still has a lot of gaps in his memory, though. Might not have always been so high stress.”

Sam nodded and looked back at his computer.

“I’m willing to look. We know nothing about her beyond some basic info. She could be important for us in some way. At least, that’s the story I’ll stick with on the record.” He told Steve.

“Off the record?” Steve asked. Sam looked up from his computer again, briefly.

“Off the record? The more time passes, the more obvious it’s going to be that he has a massive case of PTSD. He deserves a bit of happiness. If she’s alive and willing to see him.”

“And if she’s not?”

“He deserves to know what happened to someone he obviously cares about. It’ll help him. Even if the outcome’s bad, knowing’s better than not.”

“What if he… If HYDRA…”

“If HYDRA did that, made him kill her? He deserves to know that, too. We’ll deal with the fallout if it comes to that, Steve. Personally? I’m hoping for alive. You should, too.”

* * *

Steve walked to Bucky’s room and knocked on the door.

“Come in.” He heard Bucky call out.

Steve opened the door. Bucky was lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling. His expression seemed troubled, or perhaps thoughtful.

“Sam’s still looking. He’s found a few things, but nothing that leads directly to the girl you told us about.” He informed Bucky.

“Hmm.” Bucky nodded, just slightly, eyes still on the ceiling.

“Do you want to talk about her, Buck?” Bucky’s eyes drifted from the ceiling to look at Steve. His expression was neutral.

“I don’t know.” He answered honestly. “It’s all mixed up. It’s like… I have these feelings, these thoughts. But there’s not enough memories to justify it.” He snorted. “Fuck if I know, Stevie. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing?” Steve asked. Bucky managed a small smile at that.

“Jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and another quarter of ‘em don’t even belong to the puzzle, more like.”

A long silence.

“She liked plain coffee. Black. But she always had to have something sweet with it. Pastries, usually. Said they reminded her of home.” Bucky said suddenly, almost startling Steve. “No matter where we went, in a day, she always found a place to get her coffee and pastries. She liked raspberry best.” A pause. “I think she used to be some kind of pickpocket.”

Steve doesn’t ask, deciding it’s better to let his friend have an uninterrupted flow of his memories.

“You know how clothes have those security tags nowadays? She was always able to remove them somehow. Helped me steal a guy’s wallet once, more than once. She had it down to a science. Always knew which guys to target, always kept them busy while I took it.” Bucky looked a little guilty at that. “We took the cash, mailed the rest to the police station. She said taking the cash was okay, but not the other stuff. I didn’t question it. We had to make it somehow, you know?”

Steve nods. He gets it. In that situation, in any desperate ones, you do what you have to.

“My last memory of her… I _know_ this is the most recent one of her I have but I don’t know _how_ … She’s scared, but she’s trying not to show it. Asking me… Asking me if it’s this or we die. Don’t remember my answer. Don’t remember what _it_ was. Just remember she’s so close and I can smell her hair. Just remember ‘it’s this or we die, isn’t it?’”

After that, Bucky’s quiet. Steve doesn’t know what to say, not at first.

“So she could be alive, Buck.” He tries.

Bucky shakes his head.

“This or we die. _We_ die. What if… if I…”

“No, Buck. I’m not going to let you think that. You wouldn’t have killed her, not if you were yourself.” Steve insisted. Bucky looks at him, and Steve sees his friend’s eyes are shining with unshed tears.

“What if I wasn’t?” he asks. “What if I’m remembering something from after they caught us?”

Steve has no answer for that.

* * *

“Tell me you have something.” Steve says to Sam a day later.

His best friend needs this, he thinks. Needs something that is concrete proof the girl he remembers existed, even if it’s only that.

Sam motions for him to look at the computer screen. It’s a missing person’s poster. The name matches, the vital stats, the timeline, everything.

“Get Bucky in here,” Sam told him. “We’ll go over everything I’ve found.”

* * *

 

Bucky stormed off after the whole thing, going to his room and locking the door. Steve let out a sigh. He knew what he had promised Bucky. Now that they knew she had apparently escaped alive and her missing person’s case was closed, though, it made everything a million times more complicated.

The mysterious group her cousins were linked to. They needed more information on that. Her family in general they needed more information on because who knew what went on before and after she had disappeared. They might have closed ranks around her, made it impossible to get to her.

What could they even say? _“Hi, my friend here, the one with the metal arm? He was the one who traveled with your daughter for a year after they broke out of a facility for a group dedicated to world domination. Can he see her, please? They had something going.”_

Even with all the things that had happened thus far, he doubted that _that_ would be easy to swallow. Besides, Bucky was still a wanted man, which made it worse. What if someone had made the connections before they had and done something, what if she was living a quiet life that Bucky’s search would disrupt?

What if. What if. What if.

“You know we need to see this through to the end.” Sam told him, interrupting his thoughts.

“We could be putting someone innocent in danger.” He reminded Sam.

Sam snorted.

“Doubt it. I’m just saying. She seemed close to her family from some of those pictures. She could know some things about the group, even if she isn’t one of them. You know that this group may be important allies to us. Even just an important contact to have.”

Steve sighed again. Sam had a point.

“I’m worried about Bucky, though.” Steve admitted to Sam. “Say we are able to find this group, but she doesn’t want to see him, wants to forget the whole thing happened. What do we do then?”

“Just play it by ear for now, Steve. Talk to Bucky. Frame it as checking on her safety and seeing if she’s alive. That’s what he seems to want for now, to see her alive with his own eyes. You know he won’t believe anything else.” And Steve knew Sam had a point. He always did. “After that, we go from there. One step at a time, Cap.”

Sam patted Steve’s shoulder and went back to his computer, saying something about looking up tickets to Boston.

Steve went to Bucky’s door, knocked, and waited. For a minute or so, he heard nothing. Then the door unlocked. He waited a few seconds before opening the door and walking in.

Bucky was looking through the bookshelves in his room.  There wasn’t much there, but Steve suspected it had less to do with the bookshelves themselves and more about some kind of memory. Or maybe he just didn’t want to look at Steve. That was possible, too.

“She loved to read. She always had a new book to read, everywhere we went. Read to me at night when the nightmares were too much. She had an awful lot of Hemingway memorized off the top of her head for some reason. She’d recount that if she didn’t have a new book.” Bucky told Steve, still not looking at him. “Her favorite book was this one with all these different things going on at once or talking about things that may or may not have happened and the book itself was physically weird. I tried reading it with her but it made me feel paranoid and claustrophobic and I still don’t know why.” He chuckled at that.

Steve bit his lip, uncertain over whether to interrupt Bucky’s musings. Then Bucky looked over to him.

“But you didn’t come here to hear me talk about her.” He said, turning away from the bookcase to look at Steve. Steve nodded.

“Sam’s looking up tickets to Boston. We’re going there to check on the group her cousin and those others belong to.” He explained.

Bucky nodded. The question was there, in his eyes, but he didn’t ask.

“Buck. If you go to Boston, you can check on her, make sure she’s safe. But anything other than that… It might be too dangerous.” Steve told him. “Promise me that if we do this, you won’t do anything stupid.”

“Yeah. I just… I need to make sure she’s alright.” Steve narrowed his eyes, knowing that that wasn’t exactly a promise to keep distance.

“You need to keep your distance, Bucky. At least until we get the lay of the land.”

Bucky nodded, and then turned back to the bookshelf, signaling that the conversation was over. Steve watched his friend for a moment, and then he left the room.

There were so many ways that this could do wrong, Steve knew. But he had still promised Bucky. If the situations had been reversed, he knew that Bucky would have his back. He just had to trust his friend.

**Author's Note:**

> The book Bucky mentions ("this one with all these different things going on at once or talking about things that may or may not have happened and the book itself was physically weird") is meant to be House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.


End file.
